Buying into Choshi Wind Power and becoming a generator (2012)

A business with a completion date, and one without

Contracting has an end. You take the job, build it, hand it over, collect the money, and the relationship with that site is finished but for the warranty period. Power generation has no such end. A turbine turns for twenty or thirty years from the day it is raised, and for all that time the electricity revenue keeps coming in — while repairs, the degradation of the equipment, and the economics after the purchase tariff expires all remain with the owner. The stake taken in October 2012 was Kandenko’s decision to bring this second flow of time onto its own books.

The difference in how profit and loss appear became visible in figures within a little over a decade. Construction profit is fixed at completion; the economics of generating plant rebound as impairment every time the outlook changes. The ¥3.3 billion written down in the year to March 2024 and the ¥2.0 billion in 2025 arise from that difference in method. Kandenko did not let the assets go: in July 2024 it created a division to hold generation and new business together. The two wind farms that started running at Choshi in 2004 and 2006 were still listed among its plants in March 2025, thirteen years after they were bought.